Walking and Driving Tours

One of the most popular communication vehicles that communities and groups use to promote their heritage is a walking tour, or sometimes a driving tour.

One of the reasons that walking/driving tours are so popular is because they appear easy to do – featuring short texts and lots of images. And given a modest outlay of time for writing and design, and usually a modest cost for production, they can indeed be very effective.

The focus of a walking/driving tour is sites – usually historic buildings and some sites that have historical associations. And so given this kind of attention, Heritage Manitoba recommends that communities and groups consider these thoughts as they develop a local walking/driving tour:

Does your community have a reasonable collection of historic buildings and sites that merit the production of a walking/driving tour?

Is the collection focused or varied – for example, is it a commercial core with similar buildings aligned in a row; or is it a variety of buildings with various functions and spread over a large area?

Have you done a "Special Places" project (Link to Our Essential Past: Collect the Facts/Model Projects)? This kind of initiative is designed to ensure that a community's architectural history and claims are clearly defined and enunciated via a range of communication materials

Do you have locally available people knowledgeable about historic buildings and architecture; about the community's and the province's history?

Does your community's built past have an over-arching theme or angle that can be used in an introduction to the tour – to help readers see individual buildings as part of a larger theme?

Do you have locally available writers and editors?

Do you have locally available photographer or illustrator to provide compelling images?

Do you have a local graphic designer who can develop the tour in the most effective and attractive way?

Have you thought about the audience – in terms of the content and the tour design?

Do you have the funding necessary for production?

Do you have a distribution strategy in place?

Have you contacted owners of potential entries on the tour? Do they approve?